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uncommon sense: There’s More to Ugandahttp://anthronow.com/print/uncommon-sense-theres-more-to-uganda
http://anthronow.com/print/uncommon-sense-theres-more-to-uganda#respondTue, 30 Sep 2014 03:26:12 +0000http://anthronow.com/?p=3535Mike’s brother in a brickyard, talking on his cell phone. Like many Ugandan villagers, he makes bricks for a living. Once piled into a tall structure, the bricks will be fired in place then sold. Photo by Elizabeth Chin. In a small...]]>

Mike’s brother in a brickyard, talking on his cell phone. Like many Ugandan villagers, he makes bricks for a living. Once piled into a tall structure, the bricks will be fired in place then sold. Photo by Elizabeth Chin.

In a small village in eastern Uganda, I sat on the porch of my host’s home. A retired head teacher, he has a rumbling, stentorian voice that commands authority. As we sipped tea, he looked over at me and asked: “Is it true that in your country it is legal for a man to go with a goat?”

After a moment, I sputtered, “Well, no!”

He considered my answer. “But it is legal for a man to go with a man?”

I told him “Yes.”

He continued, “And for a woman to go with a woman?”

“That too,” I said.

He didn’t seem shocked or disgusted. He struck me, rather, as utterly mystified. Our awkward silence was broken when the children start arriving home from school—at least 20 of them who ranged from mid-teens to teeny tiny. Their parents, sons and daughters-in-law of my host, occupy their own huts in this compound or nearby. As each child arrived, he or she came and sank down on both knees, offering a hand from this kneeling position. This traditional greeting was performed for each adult in the compound.

***

Since my arrival in Uganda in late January, the news both in and out of the country has been dominated by discussion of two controversial laws, one declaring homosexuality illegal, and the other an anti-pornography law that has somehow been interpreted as an anti-miniskirt law. Both laws are draconian, mean-spirited and wrong-headed. Despite this, however, Uganda strikes me not as a country full of bigotry and violence, but rather as a deeply conventional country that is facing—like much of the global south—rapid and destabilizing changes to its society. Blessed with fertile soil and abundant rain, huge swathes of verdant land have already been taken for corporate-owned tea and banana plantations. Now that the carbon credit market is heating up, so to speak, foreign interests are busy planting pine forests to earn themselves some environmental points. Pine trees, it turns out, are excellent at absorbing carbon dioxide and emitting huge amounts of oxygen. They are not, however, native to the equatorial tropics; they ruin the soil permanently, and are among the reasons that the peasant farmers who constitute the overwhelming majority of Uganda’s population are increasingly without land or means of livelihood. To the west, oil has been discovered, disrupting land ownership there. China is busy building sleek highways in that direction, providing infrastructure in exchange for access to precious resources. In the north, where conflict seems never to abate, scuffles between anti-government forces are hard to tell from the bleed-over from what looks more and more like civil war in South Sudan.

In these and so many other instances, foreign imperatives and agendas come together to make most Ugandans’ lives much more complicated and miserable than they otherwise might be. With a government that depends for the bulk of its budget on foreign aid, the degree to which the nation is indeed sovereign seems just a tad in doubt. President Museveni, who has held power for 27 years, must take pains to assert his control. On one side, he has to deal with a parliament whipped into a frenzy with drafting these silly laws, now including one punishing people for “willful” transmission of HIV. On the other, big brother-y interests such as the United States and the IMF threaten to put a choke hold on the economy if he enforces the anti-gay laws (apparently the anti-pornography law is not disturbing enough to the international community to warrant a response). What’s a despot to do?

It is in this context that the anti-homosexuality and anti-pornography laws seem perhaps less about punishing specific people and more about asserting some sort of Ugandan independence. In fact, there are pockets of people who argue—either separately or together—that homosexuality, miniskirts and evangelical Christianity are all colonialist imports to Uganda that ought to be stamped out. As one friend remarked to me, “and THAT interpretation is just twisted enough to make a liberal think twice!” It certainly seems quite clear that the emergence of the government’s obsession with homosexuality can be traced to evangelical Christians from the United States, who have been hard at work for some time on spreading their ideas abroad. In particular, their efforts center around making homosexuality the object of legislation; anti-gay violence is the not-so-surprising side effect. Now, there is no doubt that Uganda is not exactly a gay-friendly country. On the other hand, absent the efforts of these extremist and hateful Christians, homosexuality previously was not a particularly hot-button issue. Nor were miniskirts, although it is true that women can expect quite a bit of pawing, ogling and other unpleasant reactions from men if they wear tight or revealing clothing in public places. What appalls me most about the situation is the degree to which so many everyday Ugandans—gay and straight—end up suffering for other peoples’ self-serving agendas.

***

It is worth remembering that in the small villages where most Ugandans live, daily life is not characterized by the smorgasbord of lifestyle and consumer options that typify the urban cosmopolitan setting. In the 1980s when I worked at an upscale grocery store in New York’s Greenwich Village, for example, there was a customer who routinely came in dressed as a clown. She was not a professional clown stopping in after a birthday party gig. She was a woman who dressed like a clown in her daily life. In New York, in “the Village,” nobody bats an eye at that kind of thing. In the Ugandan village, distinctions cut much finer. Children looked at my palm and asked, “Do you dig? Your hands are so soft!”

So as not to appear utterly lame, I said, “Well, I can dig, but where I live we don’t dig.” “Why?” asked one person in shock. I answered that in the United States, many people have no land to dig.

“You mean where you come from you don’t have inherited land?” another inquired in disbelief.

At home people tend to classify me as extremely fit and lean. Here in the village, where my body and hands are “soft,” I suddenly realized that the villagers think I’m laughably weak. This helps to explain why they keep discouraging me from walking anywhere. They think I’m simply incapable. When I also managed to mention that I do not know how to make bricks or build a hut or thatch it, they quickly seemed to decide that I’m deficient, a simpleton. The truth is, they’re right. In their world, I am pretty useless. I can’t carry water, I don’t know how to cook millet bread or roast sorghum, and I certainly can’t dig.

My host rumbled again. “You are at the junior home, you know.” After a pause he continued: “Yes, I must admit it, I am a polygamist.” Since I’m an anthropologist, I’m not especially shocked. I know about these kinds of kinship arrangements. As a middle-class parent from the United States, however, I found myself wondering how he can afford to have all those kids, and concluded that he can’t “afford” them. With two wives and more than a dozen children, my host will be unable to provide each of his sons with enough land for sustenance. Let’s not even think too hard about the daughters, who will be married off. Uganda’s population is the youngest in the world, and in the city where culture wars are raging about miniskirts and the expression of sexuality, hundreds of thousands of young people who have had to leave their villages scramble for a living in Kampala’s slums, most earning less than $200 a year.

I have come to the village because my pal, whom I call “my main man Mike,” is one of those young people. Mike calls my host “my other dad,” which is to say, he is Mike’s uncle. Like my host, Mike’s father is a polygamist. Mike’s mother is the junior wife, and his father educated the senior wife’s children much more thoroughly than those of the junior wife. Though several of the senior wife’s children were sent to university, Mike’s education finished with high school. Mike’s mom was routinely beaten mercilessly by his dad, and five years ago she took her young children and left to work her own father’s land a few kilometers away. She’s been on her own ever since. Mike helps her out when he can, but he earns 100,000 UGX a month, less than $40 USD. At 23, he has been living on his own for the last two years in Kampala, sharing an 8 x 10-foot room with a good friend. One boy is a Christian, the other a Muslim. One works nights, the other days, and in this way they can easily share the room’s one twin-sized bed. Working as a security guard, Mike puts in six 12-hour shifts a week. When we met Mike’s dad, up at the senior wife’s compound, the larger part of me wanted to haul off and give him the what-for. Standing next to his father, Mike beamed and said, “I like him so much!” I have to admit, I cannot imagine why; I privately decide to like him not one bit.

In the apartment where I stay in Kampala, the nearby evangelical church manages to blast its sermons out at the same time as the local mosque is broadcasting its call to prayer. I doubt the timing is accidental. In terms of the annoyance factor, the evangelicals win, hands down. Most nights they blare their salvation from their blown-out speakers until well after two in the morning. What happened to swords into plough-shares, I wonder. The distorted sounds of their salvation assault the neighborhood nightly. I’m rankled at the busybodies who seek to impose their ideas on Uganda, on gays, on anybody. I’m jaggedly raging at Mike’s dad, who has picked and chosen among his kids, as all fathers of so many children inevitably must. I’m frustrated that Uganda appears to the rest of the world a scary backwater with nothing much better to do than pass insane laws.

Mike’s own hut in his father’s compound now sits their own children, now that he lives in Kampala. Photo by Elizabeth Chin.

Margaret Mead once said that “the best society is one where every human gift is valued.” Are beliefs that lead to violence and injustice also in some way human gifts? How do we breach the distance between our own ways and the ways of others that we might find profoundly disturbing? I am among those who yearn for a world in which all gifts might be valued, but I struggle to learn the difference between a gift and a curse. Mike wants his mom to go back and live in his dad’s compound. To me, that makes about as much sense as it being legal for a man to go with a goat. Mike, meanwhile, calculates how much money he will need to build his mom a small house in the compound. “I will build the walls of mud,” he muses. “I wanted to be a high school teacher. But that dream has disappeared.” As I glower, Mike smiles and laughs and holds no grudges. “That’s just life,” he says.

Note

Photos by Elizabeth Chin.

Elizabeth Chin joined the faculty of Art Center in 2011 as a founding member of the Media Design Practices/Field program. As an anthropologist her practice includes performative scholarship, experimental writing and collaborative ethnography. Her book Purchasing Power (Minnesota 2001) was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award. In 2007 she won the AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology.

]]>http://anthronow.com/print/uncommon-sense-theres-more-to-uganda/feed0Why Anthropology Still Matters: Paul Stollerhttp://anthronow.com/press-watch/why-anthropology-still-matters-paul-stoller
http://anthronow.com/press-watch/why-anthropology-still-matters-paul-stoller#commentsThu, 01 Aug 2013 18:39:03 +0000http://anthronow.com/?p=3104Upon receiving the Anders Retzius gold medal for his significant scientific contribution to anthropology, Paul Stoller reflects on the meanings of the discipline and ponders over its value in this market economy with anthropologist, Gina Athena...]]>

Upon receiving the Anders Retzius gold medal for his significant scientific contribution to anthropology, Paul Stoller reflects on the meanings of the discipline and ponders over its value in this market economy with anthropologist, Gina Athena Ulysse, in her new interview series, Why Anthropology Still Matters on Huffington Post.

]]>http://anthronow.com/press-watch/why-anthropology-still-matters-paul-stoller/feed2Dig Wars!http://anthronow.com/press-watch/dig-wars
http://anthronow.com/press-watch/dig-wars#respondSat, 27 Jul 2013 10:08:53 +0000http://anthronow.com/?p=3095The American Anthropological Association has written to the Travel Channel objecting to and asking for changes in the TV show "Dig Wars," in which contestants are sent to various locations with metal detectors to see if they can locate and dig up...]]>

The American Anthropological Association has written to the Travel Channel objecting to and asking for changes in the TV show “Dig Wars,” in which contestants are sent to various locations with metal detectors to see if they can locate and dig up antiquities. The material they dig up is called “loot,” and is evaluated for its financial value.

With the 21st century’s constantly evolving technological innovations and the wild success of bulk-shopping stores, our hoarding habits have gotten worse. Some of us feel like we’re drowning every time we take a moment to look around our homes.

A recently published book called Life at Home in the 21st Century indicates that we’re living in more clutter than ever before: our shelves are jammed with dozens of jars of tomato sauce bought on sale at Costco or with outdated electronics that we can’t bear to throw away because they’re too valuable.

Of the 32 middle-class families from Los Angeles who were studied for the book, only one-quarter could use their garage to store their cars since they were so packed with unused junk.

[…]“We were able to identify a troubling health trend,” said Arnold. “The physiological stress that occurs among women who see their homes as cluttered may have some long-term health consequences.”

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff

08/09/2012

]]>http://anthronow.com/press-watch/clutter-and-stress/feed0Capitalism and Intuitionhttp://anthronow.com/press-watch/capitalism-and-intuition
http://anthronow.com/press-watch/capitalism-and-intuition#respondMon, 11 Jun 2012 12:32:08 +0000http://anthronow.com/?p=2092Grant McCracken, an anthropologist, provides some business and management advice at Forbes.com: For decades, the mandate of successful executives was to set a plan and stick with it. Those days are gone, says Grant McCracken...]]>

For decades, the mandate of successful executives was to set a plan and stick with it. Those days are gone, says Grant McCracken […] “Capitalism used to be so analytical, precise, and rule-oriented,” he says. “The whole job of management was staying away from what was intuitive.” But the reverse is now true, he argues, and the most successful leaders are experts in adapting quickly and listening to their hunches.

The transition to a new business reality isn’t easy. “We’re living in a world so complicated, we want to have access to the full, deepest part of our problem-solving abilities,” says McCracken, “and that means we’re dealing with something messier and harder to manage. The organizations that flourish in a world like this are fast, noisy, and intuitive. It can be really tough for managers.”

Dorie Clark, 06/07/2012

]]>http://anthronow.com/press-watch/capitalism-and-intuition/feed0An Anthropologist to Head the World Bank?http://anthronow.com/press-watch/an-anthropologist-to-head-the-world-bank
http://anthronow.com/press-watch/an-anthropologist-to-head-the-world-bank#respondMon, 26 Mar 2012 18:18:32 +0000http://anthronow.com/?p=1898The White House named Jim Yong Kim as its nominee to head to World Bank. Jim Yong Kim is the president of Dartmouth College, an anthropologist, a physician and a global health expert. This nomination forms a radical break from the traditional...]]>

The White House named Jim Yong Kim as its nominee to head to World Bank. Jim Yong Kim is the president of Dartmouth College, an anthropologist, a physician and a global health expert. This nomination forms a radical break from the traditional profiles of the World Bank leaders. Shall this appointment be approved, this would be one of the most influential positions any anthropologist has ever reached. It remains to be seen how Jim Yong Kim anthropological understanding would translate into global and local policies.

BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia’s top prosecutor is questioning why a shaman, or medicine man, was paid $2,000 to keep rain away from the closing ceremony of the Under-20 World Cup.

The attorney general’s office opened the investigation Tuesday after the comptroller’s office in Bogota questioned cost overruns of more than $1 million — the shaman’s charges included. The official cost of the August ceremony was $2.5 million.

Anthropologist Ana Marta de Pizarro helped organize the ceremony and says the shaman was justified.

She said: “Had it rained, the event would not have taken place. It didn’t rain on the ceremony, it was successful and I would use him again if I needed to.”

Pizarro said the shaman had been used at other outdoor events in the country.

The Under-20 World Cup was held for three weeks last year across Colombia, with Brazil winning the final.

Press here or here to stream to program online, or alternatively press here to download the program in an MP3 format

]]>http://anthronow.com/press-watch/the-banking-sector/feed0BBC Business Daily dedicated its 29th of December program to “The Banking tribe:” Anthropologists spend decades studying the culture and rituals of obscure tribes in Africa and the Amazon but Dutch anthropologist Joris Luyendik tells...BBC Business Daily dedicated its 29th of December program to “The Banking tribe:” Anthropologists spend decades studying the culture and rituals of obscure tribes in Africa and the Amazon but Dutch anthropologist Joris Luyendik tells...economics – Anthropology NowTrashhttp://anthronow.com/press-watch/trash
http://anthronow.com/press-watch/trash#respondTue, 15 Nov 2011 10:59:36 +0000http://anthronow.com/?p=1655The Seattle Times introduces the work of David Giles, an anthropology graduate student whose research interests revolve around trash: For his doctoral thesis, the University of Washington student is examining how cultural assumptions of what is...]]>

The Seattle Times introduces the work of David Giles, an anthropology graduate student whose research interests revolve around trash:

For his doctoral thesis, the University of Washington student is examining how cultural assumptions of what is appetizing lead to the disposal of surplus, edible food. He’s become a pro at vaulting into Dumpsters, picking through their contents and befriending people who make a meal of other people’s leftovers.

In short: Giles is a Dumpster-diver.

“The first thing that hits you in the face is how good the stuff in the Dumpster is,” Giles said. “It’s thrown away because it’s not profitable.”

]]>http://anthronow.com/press-watch/trash/feed0David Graeberhttp://anthronow.com/press-watch/david-graeber
http://anthronow.com/press-watch/david-graeber#respondSat, 29 Oct 2011 16:14:58 +0000http://anthronow.com/?p=1641David Graeber is the subject of the cover story in the latest issue of the Bloomberg Businessweek magazine where he is is profiled as one of the founding activist of the Occupy Wall Street movement: David Graeber likes to say that he had three...]]>

David Graeber is the subject of the cover story in the latest issue of the Bloomberg Businessweek magazine where he is is profiled as one of the founding activist of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among the brightest, some argue, of his generation—who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests earlier this year. This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street.